O.K., LADIES--GET REAL!

By RICHARD CORLISS

In a film industry like France's, actors just act. Reigning beauties like Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Beart take a wide variety of parts, and nobody gets upset if they switch genres. Hollywood is, of course, different. There are stars, and then there are all those other people--actors. But occasionally stars want to prove their seriousness. Art stirs in their breast like an edifying influenza, and they take on roles outside their expected range. Falling prey to the lure of sackcloth and Oscars, normally glammed-up female stars don drab frocks, sport the no-makeup makeup look, play a character who opts for the spiritual over the sexual and, if possible, speak in an exotic accent. Hey, if it worked for Meryl...

Sharon Stone is the latest entrant in the Streepstakes; she plays a death-row inmate in Bruce Beresford's Last Dance. In vain would we tell her that the world has a surfeit of good actresses but damn few movie stars and that she is one of the rare modern avatars of the grand old radiance. Acting is easy, glamour is hard. But Stone wants more than to make sin chic. To increase her stature, she must diminish her luster. And so she has chosen the sort of caged-woman melodrama--but with a message--that, when Susan Hayward tried it in the 1958 I Want to Live!, won her an Oscar.

Last Dance (written by Ron Koslow and Steven Haft) is also akin to Dead Man Walking, with Stone as the grizzled con and Rob Morrow in the Sister Helen Prejean role. Cindy Liggett has spent 12 years on death row for a double murder she committed while on drugs; hope, for her, is the one hallucinogen not worth tasting. But Rick Hayes, a lawyer from the state clemency board, becomes convinced that her case has merit--and falls a little in love with her. Why not? This wretched killer is, after all, Sharon Stone.

The scenario has its soft spots, but it does allow Stone to adopt a white-trash Southern cadence and wear a persuasive dust-bowl scowl. In stir she sits and stares, her old sexual insolence tamped into sadness and contempt. She looks haggard, wiry, prickly--fabulous. By the end she is practically Garbo in Camille, the doomed woman comforting the gentle, lesser man who loves her. Stone does a fine job without surrendering her star quality. She just can't save this schematic story.

Nobody has to perform that kind of career magic in French cinema. The industry and its actresses occupy a middle-class middle ground where emotions are rarely italicized. If moviegoers are to be touched, they must do half the work, trolling for subtext, reading a heartbreak into a pensive glance. That ability to conspire with the filmmakers is especially important when viewing Beart in Claude Sautet's Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, winner of the Cesar for the year's best French film.

It could certainly have been the most French film of the year: an intimate mellow drama about instantly recognizable people, with little action and a haunting aftertaste. Nelly (Beart) is 25, bright, adorable, unhappily married; her only bad habit is in confessing to indiscretions she has not yet committed. M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault), a successful jurist and businessman at the end of his career, is writing his memoirs. He needs an assistant, and when he meets Nelly, he realizes that he needs one last immersion in the idea of love. He doesn't preen; his only showing off is in the machismo of the elderly--pretending that sharp pains don't hurt. Nor does he make a grab for Nelly. But one night he watches her sleep, his hand gently gliding above her skin like a Hovercraft.

Serrault (flossy Albin in the original film La Cage aux Folles) is a master at expressing passion through discretion. Beart (Manon of the Spring, Un Coeur en Hiver), routinely described as the most beautiful young actress in France, makes deft use of her Cocteau-painting eyes and her shy, wonderfully knowing smile. Together they create a lovely love story from what could have been a farce. Old man, pretty woman; beguiling little film.

The theme is similar in Andre Techine's Ma Saison Preferee: a middle-aged man (Daniel Auteuil) and his sister (Deneuve) facing their mother's illness and renewing their childhood intimacy, the closest bond either has known. Even when French films address volcanic feelings, they do so obliquely. Techine, who made the superb memory film Wild Reeds, seems to want to atone for the domestic skyrockets he launches in Ma Saison's first half-hour, highlighted by Deneuve's scalding remark to her attractive husband: "You've aged badly, Bruno." Sure enough, the whole family soon retreats into compromise and confession.

Deneuve, the darling of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 32 years ago, has aged gracefully; her face has acquired character, a kind of pinched authority. The sister she plays here could easily be a cliche--the efficient, neurotic manager of other people's lives--but Deneuve gives her moral gravity and grace. That is what we need from a screen beauty. As a star, Deneuve seduces us into watching her; as an actress, she reveals complexities of character we might otherwise ignore.

--By Richard Corliss